The funny thing about being a member of the Republican Party in the year 2021 is that while conservatives throw an absolute shit fit at the idea of schools teaching that systemic racism is real, they’re happy to invoke famously racist events when trying to (poorly) make an argument that life is treating them unfairly. Take Joe Biden’s push to get as many Americans vaccinated as possible. Republicans really hate this because it marries two of their least favorite things—science and doing things for the greater good. But instead of saying, “You know what, the vaccine isn’t for me,” or, “I know it’s the right thing to do, but I’m just not gonna,” they’ve decided that the idea of the president of the United States trying to prevent more people from dying, on top of the 600,000-plus who already have, isn’t just something they disagree with, it’s on par with apartheid. Yes, apartheid.
Appearing on Fox News on Wednesday, conservative activist Charlie Kirk told Tucker Carlson that he views the government encouraging people to get protected against an extremely contagious disease that to date has killed more than half a million people in the U.S. as not dissimilar to the system of institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa that existed for nearly 50 years. And/or a hostage situation.
“More than anything else, Tucker, what we are going to do is a massive public relations campaign and make sure students know they are not alone; they don’t have to hide in the shadows,” Kirk said, referring to people who choose not to get vaccinated. “It’s almost this apartheid-style, open-air hostage situation, like, ‘Oh, you can have your freedom back if you get the jab.’ This is unacceptable. We’re gonna fight back against it.” (The apartheid comparison comes on the heels of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s insistence that mask mandates and encouraging people to get vaccinated are akin to what Nazis did to Jews during the Holocaust.) This week Kirk’s Turning Point USA announced a No Forced Vax campaign, despite the fact that no one is being “forced” to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. While some colleges have made it a requirement to return to campus, students are not being blindfolded and forcibly jabbed as Kirk et al. would like people to think. Also many colleges have for years required students to be vaccinated against certain diseases like MMR, meningococcal meningitis ACWY, and hepatitis B.
Elsewhere on the conservative network, the Fox & Friends gang has suggested that the White House’s plan to go door to door to urge people to get vaccinated means someone in a lab coat is going to show up to your house and stab you in the arm. “People are up in arms about this,” Ainsley Earhardt claimed to her fellow hosts on Wednesday. “Because we as Americans can make our own choices for our own families, for our own bodies. And when someone’s knocking at your door with a vaccine, are they gonna have the shot in their hand, or are they gonna encourage you to go, ask you questions, like the Census Bureau does? Listen, when you’re cooking or you’re watching a movie, do you want someone knocking on your door that you don’t know? That’s a stranger?” Meanwhile, Laura Ingraham had a doctor on this week who told viewers it’s a “giant mistake” for anyone under 30 to get vaccinated, while Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren pinned a spike in unruly passenger behavior at airports on flight attendants enforcing masking rules, whom she dubbed “Nazis of the air.”
The conservative backlash against the government urging people to get protected against the disease comes as virtually all new COVID hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated people, thanks in part to the much more virulent Delta strain. Per CNN: